Lives 'left in ruin' by rising tide of depression drugs

TWENTY YEARS ago, Henry was living a fulfilled life. A happily married father from the Home Counties, his sales career was going well, he had a wide social circle and played football and golf regularly. "I was a conservative, head-down, career-minded person who enjoyed my life," he says.

But in 1995, a bout of flu left Henry, then 31, exhausted and lethargic. His GP told him he was depressed, and prescribed the world's most popular antidepressant, Prozac. "He said depression was a common complaint, the drugs would fix it and then I'd stop taking them."

More than a decade later, Henry was far from cured and still on antidepressants. "None of the drugs made me feel better, and most made me considerably worse. But every time I stopped them, the symptoms of what I thought was depression - but now know were of withdrawal - returned even more strongly."

By 2009, he was so unwell that he had to give up work. Finally, suspecting the drugs were the cause of his problems, he quit them, only to enter a new hell.

"It was torture. I thought I was going to die, and I didn't care. For two years, I was in severe physical pain and so weak I lay all day on the sofa. My cognition was severely affected, I was dizzy, with blurred vision, I couldn't read a bedtime story to my son and couldn't remember things that had happened just a few seconds previously."

Henry - who does not want to reveal his last name because of pending legal action against the drugs manufacturers - is just one of an estimated four million people in Britain taking antidepressants, a number that is rising sharply.

Last year, 53 million prescriptions were issued for antidepressants in England alone, nearly double the number prescribed a decade ago, and a six per cent increase in the past year. According to recent research, one in three British women and one in 10 men now take the medication at some point in their lives.

But a growing number of experts now believe depression is vastly overdiagnosed and the drugs can cause far more harm than good.

He believes that some drug giants have obfuscated the truth about antidepressants, much as tobacco firms tried to hide the dangers of cigarettes. "My research has led me to the uncomfortable conclusions that these drugs help very few people. They are often taken needlessly and, in many cases, ruining lives.

"GPs and psychiatrists hand out these drugs for the most unbelievable reasons - when patients are having marital problems or have failed exams - occasions that would make anyone feel sad and stressed but don't indicate clinical depression.

"In such cases, and also in truly depressed patients, the patients will feel better anyway with the passing of time. When they stop the drugs, withdrawal symptoms will often make them feel bad. This is often misdiagnosed as the depression not being cured, so they are told to continue taking the pills, sometimes for life."

Jo Thompson, 31, an NHS researcher, was given antidepressants for anxiety about her exams. "What I was going through - worrying about the future and choices I was making - was completely normal, in retrospect," she says.

Her GP wrote her a prescription for lorazepam, a potent benzodiazepine or anti-anxiety drug, which is in vogue, and to which around one million people are thought to be "accidentally" addicted - compared with 300,000 heroin and crack cocaine addicts. Miss Thompson took the pills but rather than feeling calmer, she went "through the roof". "I stopped eating. I'm a very sociable person but I became a hermit. Any sudden sensation terrified me, to the point where I daren't step into the shower, so I stopped washing," she says.

"In my naivety, it never occurred to me that they might be the drugs' side effects. They had been given to me by a doctor to make me better, so how could they be making things considerably worse?"

Miss Thompson ended up in hospital. "I was a shivering shell, not sleeping at all," she says. Increasingly concerned at doctors' insistence on trying different antidepressants and upping doses, she discharged herself and decided to stop the drugs overnight. As with 72 per cent of antidepressant users surveyed by CEP, doctors had given her no warning about the dangers of "cold turkey" withdrawal.

"I had no idea of the horrors that awaited me. Every second of the day was hell. I was a zombie. I just paced up and down, and asked my parents if I was going to die. I couldn't be left alone. In the car, I was overwhelmed with the urge to throw myself out."

When Miss Thompson later tackled her GP about his lack of advice, he became very defensive. "He just mumbled about not having any training," she says.

Dr James Davies, co-founder of CEP and a former NHS psychotherapist, was amazed at how freely antidepressants were handed out. "People were being medicated entirely unnecessarily, when they weren't suffering mental-health disorders but from understandable, even necessary, human experience."

Although official advice is to prescribe antidepressants in conjunction with counselling, in practice long waiting lists mean this rarely happens.

Antidepressants enjoy global popularity and the World Health Organisation recently warned that their use in many countries had gone "through the roof".

Drug companies say depression is caused by a chemical imbalance that drugs could cure. But this theory has never been proven.

Prof Gotzsche says that in fact, there's little evidence that antidepressants help anyone. "In cases of mild depression, their effect is small. Nice [the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence] recommends that antidepressants are not routinely prescribed for people with mild depression. But even in severe cases, research shows only 10 per cent of people will feel better than if they used a placebo.

"Some people ask me if I'm worried that by pointing this out people will decide to come off their drugs and become very ill," he continues. "But I'm not afraid of that, provided patients taper off their drug slowly in collaboration with their doctor. What I'm afraid of is the harm being done to so many healthy people.

"Furthermore, there are case reports in patients and controlled experiments on animals that suggest that the drugs could perhaps cause permanent brain damage; we are currently studying this."

Nine years after he began withdrawal, Henry estimates he is only 80 per cent better and has just returned to work.

"Last year, a psychiatrist told me it's unlikely I ever had depression at all, I was just run down and needed rest. Because I innocently accepted my GP's diagnosis, I've lost 20 years of my life," he says.

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